Inventions, firsts, and turning points tied to today’s date — each one sourced and dated.
On July 23, 1995, two amateur astronomers independently spotted a faint smudge near a star cluster — Comet Hale-Bopp.
In 1962 a beach-ball-sized satellite carried live pictures across an ocean for the first time, shrinking the world overnight.
A Chicago dentist bought a sputtering two-cylinder runabout, and a near-bankrupt startup became the company that would put America on wheels.
On July 23, 1829, American surveyor William Austin Burt won the first US patent for a writing machine — the typographer.
